Research publications on climate change have been coming in thick and fast with some even varying vastly from others. All of them spell doom, but how that inevitability will come about remains quite a mystery.
Will there be heavy rainfall and flooding, or will there be water scarcity and drought? There seem to be answers validating both theories.
At the Divecha Centre for Climate Change in the Indian Institute of Science, a group of scientists have dedicated themselves to working out what climate change means to the eco-system, how it will affect the human race and what mankind has done to bring it about. Dr Govindaswamy Bala, a professor at the Divecha Centre, has put together what is perhaps India’s first multi-model study to trace the trends and perhaps predict the country’s ecological future over the next couple of decades.
The conclusions have been reached based on the climate projections for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to “provide multi-model and multi-scenario temperature and precipitation projections for India for the period of 1860 to 2099 based on the new climate data,” wrote Dr Bala.
“Warming in India is likely to be in the rage of 1.7 to 2 degrees C by 2030 and 3.3 to 5.8 degrees C by 2080”, said Dr Bala. “Precipitation under the business-as-usual scenario is projected to increase from 4 per cent to 5 per cent over the next two decades”.
According to his paper, the northern parts of the country are likely to experience more warming than the south, with the Himalayas and Kashmir possibly being subject to warming to the tune of 8 degrees C, according to one model.
“Limiting warming to roughly 2 degrees C by the end of the century is unlikely since it requires an immediate ramp-down of emissions followed by ongoing carbon sequestration,” he wrote.